Forced Entry

by Stephen Solomita

  “How are you going to do that?” Sylvia smiled. “If you left your crystal ball at home, that probably means you forgot your magic wand, as well.”

  “Betty said you were a schoolteacher before you retired. When I was in fourth grade, Mrs. Benedict always used to say, ‘Stanley, you’d forget your ears if they weren’t attached to your head.’ ”

  Relief began to seep into Sylvia Kaufman, like the warmth of a hot bath after an afternoon shoveling snow. Moodrow was a physical monster; if he didn’t reek of cop, he’d be terrifying. But there was confidence to go with the bulk; if he believed…

  “I think there might be a problem when Yang shows up,” Moodrow said. “It’d be better if you went inside. Just in case.”

  “Maybe I could be of some help…”

  Moodrow laughed. “How about sending me the little guy who asked that I should be thrown out of the meeting? To give me a hand if Yang decides to get tough.”

  “Mike Birnbaum?”

  “Wait a second.” Moodrow stiffened as soon as he heard the sharp clank of the lobby door closing. “Go into your apartment,” he ordered. “Right now.”

  He actually pushed her, though he was gentle, and Sylvia began to move down the hallway, fumbling for her keys. She had every intention of following his instructions, but her curiosity overcame her fear before she found the key chain and she looked back to see a small Oriental in a blue pea coat walk from the lobby into the corridor. The look of near panic that came over his face when he saw Moodrow standing in his path was so comical, she forgot Moodrow’s order altogether.

  “Hello, Joey,” Moodrow said. It was too late to worry about Sylvia; the first rule of survival in a gun-mad city is to keep the suspect in plain view at all times. Pat Sheehan had described Joey Yang and while there might be more than one short, slim Oriental living in the building, Yang’s expression upon sighting Moodrow made it unlikely that he was the victim of mistaken identity. Still, Moodrow called him by his first name and when Yang made no protest, Moodrow took the identification as confirmed.

  “Don’t put your hands in your pockets, Joey. In fact, don’t move your fucking hands at all.” Moodrow, speaking very softly (but with his own jacket unbuttoned to make the presence of his. 38 more than obvious), walked quickly toward the much smaller Joey Yang, who stood frozen for a second, his narrow eyes widening with unexpected terror, before spinning and running for the door. Moodrow, anticipating the flight (and much too slow to catch the hundred and thirty pound Joey Yang) tossed his overcoat into the backs of Yang’s legs, a move designed merely to slow Yang down, but which tripped him, instead. By the time Yang got to his knees, Moodrow was standing over him, smiling.

  “Lemme help you up, Joey.” Moodrow picked the kneeling Yang off the ground by the back of his coat and shoved him against the wall. Curiously, Moodrow was nearly as convinced of his own “cophood” as Joey Yang, who didn’t doubt that he was about to be arrested for a second. “You don’t have a gun in there, Joey. You ain’t carrying no gun, I hope. How come your hands ain’t against the wall? What the fuck’s the matter with you? That’s better. For a second I thought you was gonna tell me you never been busted before and I wouldn’t like it if you told me lies.”

  Moodrow’s right hand was darting in and out of Joey Yang’s pockets like the head of an exploring python. Dipping, searching, pulling back. He found the gun Pat had warned him about in the waistband of Yang’s trousers, but that was the least of it. In a plastic sandwich bag taped to the small man’s thigh, Moodrow discovered thirty bundles of heroin. Three thousand dollars, retail, the following day’s supply for Yang’s slowly expanding operation.

  “This is really bad for you, Joey,” Moodrow continued. “ ’Cause you got a gun on you which is an automatic year, even if you don’t have no priors, which I think you got. Also, they changed the dope laws now, so this much smack is a B felony unless you rat your people out. Which, even if you do rat, you still gotta do some time. This kinda weight and the judge don’t have discretion.”

  Moodrow stuffed the heroin into the pocket of his jacket and the gun (a piece-of-shit. 22 that was sixty percent likely to misfire) in his overcoat pocket where it wouldn’t be a temptation for Joey Yang, who was in the process of collecting himself.

  “Don’t I have rights?” Yang’s voice had no accent and less conviction. As a third generation American, he not only spoke English perfectly, he knew that “rights” were abstractions most cops reserved for the witness stand. Especially if the cops wanted something besides a bust, as this cop obviously did. That hope of “something besides a bust” was his excuse for not insisting on his “rights.” That’s why he was allowing himself to be pushed into the elevator. “I hope you got a search warrant,” he said by way of opening negotiations. “If you don’t have a warrant, you can’t use the dope against me. It’s tainted.”

  “What do I give a shit what color it is?” Moodrow asked, tossing Sylvia Kaufman a casual wink as the elevator door closed.

  “Huh?”

  “Didn’t you just say the evidence was ‘tinted’?”

  Joey Yang looked up at his captor. Was the cop joking; could he really be that stupid? “You can’t take anything you find in an illegal search and use it in court,” he insisted. “It’s inadmissible.”

  “Wrong, Joey.” Moodrow’s voice was suddenly much harder. “ ’Cause I’m gonna say you opened your coat when you came through the door and I saw the gun in your belt. That gives me the right to do anything, but kill you. For instance, just because you have that fucking gun, I could justify any kind of a beating. A broken nose, cracked ribs, a closed eye…All I gotta say is, ‘I observed the perpetrator put his hand on the gun.’ Now, if you had remembered to tape the gun, you could say it was a plant, but I’ll bet my left testicle that. 22’s got your prints all over it. Let’s face facts, you could do a lotta time, Joey, and, if you don’t mind my saying so, little dudes, like you, don’t fare too well in the joint. They tend to get victimized by the other prisoners.”

  Suddenly Moodrow put his arm around the much smaller man and hugged him close. “Joey, you look like you’re smart enough to know that I know what I’m talking about. Smart is not always a good thing for the dope business, but in this case, it could help you out, because when I explain that my intention is not to make a bust, you could believe it without me sayin’ it over and over. Of course, that don’t mean you couldn’t still find yourself in the joint. It only means that if you do the right thing here, you could walk away. Tonight. You could really walk away.”

  Neither of them spoke until the door to the elevator opened onto an empty fourth floor corridor. Having advanced the bait, Moodrow was waiting for Yang to bite. The deal he was offering—freedom—was too good to resist, especially when compared to New York’s penal system, and Moodrow was convinced that Yang would come around.

  In fact, Yang, as Moodrow had predicted, was contemplating life at Rikers Island, where he would be subject to one sexual assault after another. Small and slender, with ivory skin and thick, jet-black hair, the wolves would be unable to resist his charms. In an instant, despair overwhelmed him as completely as a rush of injected heroin or smoked cocaine, translating itself as the intention to do “whatever it takes” to get out of the situation.

  “Tell me what you want,” he finally asked.

  “I wanna go in the apartment and talk to your partner for a little while, but I’m concerned he might have a gun in there and use it to shoot me. I really hate it when they do that, so I was thinking that you could start earning your freedom by helping me get inside. By telling me the code you gotta give before you unlock the door. So your partner could know it’s you coming in.”

  They were in the corridor now, walking toward 4B. Moodrow was right about Joey Yang’s intelligence. Joey had grown up middle-class ambitious and been admitted to Columbia before discovering cocaine. He knew the consequences of killing a cop in New York; his own people would drop the dime.

  �
�Knock twice before you turn the key,” he said.

  “Not me,” Moodrow whispered, gathering the back of Yang’s pea coat in one huge hand. “You, Joey. You go in first.” He pulled his own .38 and held it out where Yang could see it. “And no mistakes. Not one. Like forgetting to tell me if you know there’s someone in there besides your partner.”

  “There’s one other person. I forgot.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The whore from downstairs. Connie Appastello. We keep her stoned and she fucks for us when she’s not working.”

  Moodrow, without putting the gun down (and without letting go of Joey Yang), knocked twice on the door to 4B, then quickly turned the key in the lock, before pushing the door open to find Georgie Vallone sitting next to Connie Appastello on the couch. Vallone, in powder-blue jockey shorts (replete with full erection) looked even more surprised than Connie who, though naked to the waist, made no move to cover her breasts, reaching instead for the crack pipe. Until Moodrow’s voice froze her in her tracks.

  “Not a fucking twitch,” he warned, his eyes darting from corner to corner. Apartment 4B was a studio with a tiny, obviously empty, kitchen, but the door to the bathroom was closed. “You, Vallone, come off the couch and lie flat on the floor. And you, the whore, you lie on top of him.” He leveled the gun. “Do it fast.” As soon as they were down, he pushed Joey Yang onto the pile and went to the bathroom door, careful to keep his bulk out of the line of fire as he pushed it open. It was empty and, as he walked back to the pile of squirming bodies, the pleasure he always took in his work coursed through his body like a blush.

  “Okay, so here’s the story,” he began. “I only got two sets of cuffs and there’s three people. So even though I’m gonna cuff you around the steam pipe in the corner (where you could all start moving to, by the way), you’re gonna have one hand free. You shouldn’t let that influence you into doing anything stupid, okay?” He nodded to Connie, who was off the floor. “You wanna get dressed?” he asked, then noticed that her eyes were glued, not to her clothing, but to a crack pipe fashioned from a one-ounce bottle of Jack Daniels. “Guess not. How about you, George? You cold?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Pardon me? Did I hear you employ bad language in front of a woman?” Moodrow’s voice was even, despite Vallone’s mounting rage. The Italian was very muscular, but his eyes had the look of a man who’d been stoned for a long time and the little speech he finally gave was so stupid, it proved that fact to Moodrow. Beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  “You can’t shoot me,” Vallone said, turning to face what he, too, had no doubt was an ambitious cop making an arrest. “I don’t have a gun, so you can’t shoot me. You gotta take me with ya hands.”

  “No problem, asshole.”

  Moodrow, always quick to seize an opportunity to get his message across, threw a short, economical right lead that landed against the side of Vallone’s head with stunning force. It disoriented Vallone to the point where, even if he was thinking of retaliation, Moodrow’s several heads were spinning too fast to be hit. In fact, it seemed like several shoes rushing up to crack into his legs, kicking them out from under him, and several hands that hauled him back to his feet. Which was just as well, because if Georgie Vallone wasn’t so confused, he might have noted how rapidly the left side of his face was swelling.

  “Connie,” Moodrow said confidently, “here’s two sets of handcuffs. I want you to start by putting one ring on…”

  He went about it methodically, as a good cop should, letting Connie wrap the cuffs around the pipe until the three were securely fastened. Then he tossed the apartment, inch by inch, recovering Vallone’s and Yang’s personal effects, as well as more than four hundred vials of crack and an expensive 9mm Smith & Wesson.

  “Do you like stories?” Moodrow asked, going over to the sink.

  “Please, can I go?” Connie begged, the panic finally cutting through the cocaine. “I don’t belong here. I live downstairs. I’m not a dealer.”

  “That’s very rude, Connie. I was talking to Georgie.”

  “Listen,” the prostitute continued, taking a deep breath before pushing her breasts at Moodrow. “If you like what you see, we could work something out. Men love my techniques; I get all kinds of repeat business and I’ll do you whatever you want.”

  “Cut the crap, already.” Moodrow was afraid she’d panic, maybe scream. If the neighbors called the cops (perhaps because it was a dealer’s apartment), the sergeant might let him off the hook because he was once a cop, but he would have to chance a patrol sergeants mood and Moodrow was committed to not taking chances in his work. “I have about as much interest in your ass as I do in getting a blow-job from a snapping turtle. But I’m not interested in busting you, either. What I got is a personal interest in this fucking building. Understand? I got a personal interest in the people who live here and they don’t like you. They don’t like your dope or your tits. They don’t like freaks coming in here and raping old ladies. They don’t like junkies or crackheads or pigs that give blow-jobs in hallways.”

  Now he had their attention. The “maybe you won’t have to go to jail” gambit never failed to get the attention of the truly guilty. “What you two scumbags are gonna do is move out. Tonight.” With all the nonchalance he could muster, Moodrow turned on the water in the sink and began, vial by vial, to empty the jumbo pellets into the swirl of hot water running down the drain. The steam rising up around his hand as he disposed of nearly ten thousand dollars’ worth of crack and smack, was part of the intended effect. “Which shouldn’t upset you, because you ain’t been here long enough to make real friends.”

  He went on and on, chatting almost to himself while he completed his work. It took nearly half an hour to open every crack vial and heroin envelope, to gather up the clothing, the small pieces of jewelry and stuff them into garbage bags, to rip apart each piece of furniture in a brazen display of personal strength. To unload the two pistols, letting the cartridges drop to the carpet, then tear the handles from the stocks before dumping what was left onto the garbage heap in the center of the room.

  “What’s happening now,” he finally announced, touching Georgie Vallone’s swollen eye gingerly, “is that I’m keeping the keys to this apartment and I’m gonna lock the door after you leave. Of course, you could always come back and break the door down, but you notice that I threw the vials and the envelopes on the floor, so if you try to get back inside, one of those neighbors who don’t like you worth a shit is liable to call the cops. These cops, because they’re investigating a possible felony, will have probable cause to enter the premises without a warrant. In which case all traces of dope remaining in this paraphernalia are admissible. They ain’t even tinted a little bit.”

  NINE

  March 1

  THERE WERE TWO PREMATURE victory celebrations following Moodrow’s summary eviction of the undesirables in 4B. Sylvia Kaufman’s, in deference perhaps to her years, got under way first and combined two goals. There was the celebration, of course, but Sylvia Kaufman was too savvy to believe that all her problems would disappear just because Stanley Moodrow had strong-armed a couple of junkies. It was a relief to see the trash moving out for a change; the traffic had been going the other way for a long time, but the new super, an overweight, red-nosed Irishman who reeked of alcohol, hadn’t fixed the front door locks, citing the expense and the necessity of getting an estimate approved by Precision Management before the repairs could go forward. She’d complained, of course, only to have Al Rosenkrantz respond to her phone call by insisting on his own helplessness in the face of company policy. He urged her to be patient for a little while longer and “everything would straighten out.”

  Sylvia, whose strategy for life had developed in the classrooms of New York, believed that patience was a luxury reserved for the properly prepared, and preparation was, therefore, the second aim of her celebration. Preparation for a tenants’ patrol that would, itself, accomplish two aims. The patrol, if n
ot exactly girded for battle, would at least make sure the doors were locked and the junkies weren’t injecting themselves in the lobby, while the close, working relationships the tenants formed in the course of protecting their own homes would weld the small group into the nucleus of a much larger association.

  Over the past few weeks, Sylvia Kaufman had come to realize that someone had forgotten to light a flame under the melting pot called Jackson Heights. Though the tenants (in deference, perhaps, to the neighborhood’s middle-class character) were publicly polite to each other, most of the ones Sylvia knew were privately scornful. It wasn’t just the old-timers, who were all white, against the immigrants, who were any number of shades. Sylvia could vividly recall standing near the broken mailboxes, open-mouthed, while one of the Korean women complained about the odor of the Pakistanis. “They no clean,” she had insisted in the face of Sylvia’s call for tolerance. “They no wash.”

  “You notice who ain’t here, Sylvia?” Mike Birnbaum’s voice yanked her away from her speculations. “You notice who had such a big mouth, but ain’t here when it counts?”

  Once again busy serving tea and her best peanut butter/chocolate swirl cookies (so fresh they could be molded like soft clay, which nobody seemed to notice), Sylvia responded with a sigh. “You know how sick Shirley is, Mike. Myron had to go.”

  “All I know is when it was time to stand up and be counted, that cutey little faygelah went south with his mommy. This you can’t deny.” Having gotten the last, last word on Myron Gold, Mike Birnbaum settled back to enjoy his cookies. In some respects, the events of the past few weeks had been a tonic for Mike. Born Miller’s violence confirmed Mike’s belief in the imminence of personal danger while Moodrow’s muscle validated Mike’s own belligerent response to that danger. As a bonus, his growing responsibility to the tenants’ association kept him away from the “Lucy” reruns that had long dominated his old age and, best of all, Myron Gold had run away to Florida, the land of the dead.